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23 September 2011

Like a ping-pong ball in a washing machine.

I jump around a lot.

When I try to explain my mind to people, I always use the train metaphor. It goes like this:

"You know the phrase train of thought, right? Well imagine it really is a train. It goes in a straight line, usually, and it twists and turns and has little signs and there's some scenery and whatever.

Now imagine you have two train tracks. They've got two trains moving at different speeds, and their tracks cross sometimes, or sometimes a train jumps from one track to the other and they're both moving the same way, or opposite ways on collison courses, or sometimes a train derails and it's still scraping along. And that's what it's like to be in my head."

I don't know if it's especially useful, honestly, but that's the way it is.

So when I keep announcing projects and then working on something else and then back to my progress, please try to imagine what it's like to be a conductor for two trains who won't stay on their damn tracks for more than ten minutes.

2 comments:

I have exactly the same problem. Start working on one idea, which prompts another that jumps the queue and takes over, which leads to a third, and so on. I'd love to learn to block new ideas out, at least for a while.

Wouldn't it be nice, though? I find that with enough caffeine, I can make the other tracks jitter so badly that they can't hold onto a thread, leaving me with just the one train. Which is holding the coal of my idea.